1942 - The Doolittle Raid

The Doolittle RaidApril 18, 1942

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"This force is bound for Tokyo."Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, 13 April 1942

In the wake of shock and anger following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt pressed his
military planners for a strike against Tokyo. Intended as revenge for Pearl Harbor, and an act
of defiance in the face of a triumphant Japanese military, such a raid presented acute problems
in execution. No working Allied air base was close enough to Japan. A carrier would have to
approach within three hundred miles of the home islands for its planes to reach. Sending surface
ships so close to Japan at that time would practically assure their destruction, if not from
Japan's own surface forces, then from her ground-based planes or submarine forces.

Still Roosevelt insisted - demanded - that a way be found.

The first piece of the puzzle fell into place in the second week of January 1942. Captain
Francis Lowe, attached to the Admiral Ernest King's staff in Washington, paid a visit to
Norfolk, Virginia, to inspect the new carrier USS Hornet CV-8. There, on
a nearby airfield, was painted the outline of a carrier, inspiring Lowe to pursue the
possibility of launching ground-based bombers - large planes, with far greater range than
carrier-based bombers - from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

By January 16, Lowe's air operations officer, Captain Donald Duncan, had developed a
proposal. North American B-25 medium bombers, with capacity for a ton of bombs and capable of
flying 2000 miles with additional fuel tanks, could take off in the short distance of a carrier
deck, attack Japanese cities, and continue on to land on friendly airfields in mainland China.

Under a heavy veil of secrecy, Duncan and Captain Marc Mitscher, Hornet's
commanding officer, tested the concept off the Virginia coast in early February, discovering
the B-25s could be airborne in as little as 500 feet of deck space. The plan now began to
develop into action.

On April 8, 1942, the same day that the Americans and Filipinos defending Bataan Peninsula
surrendered, Enterprise steamed slowly out of Pearl Harbor. With her escorts
- the cruisers Salt Lake City and Northampton, four
destroyers and a tanker - she turned northwest and set course for a point in the north Pacific,
well north of Midway, and squarely on the International Date Line.

Six days earlier, Enterprise's sister ship Hornet
had sailed from San Francisco, also accompanied by a cruiser and destroyer screen. Ploughing
westwards, Hornet carried a somewhat unusual cargo. Arrayed across her
aft flight deck, in two parallel rows, sat 16 Mitchell B-25 bombers: Army Air Force medium
bombers. By all appearances, the bombers were too large to possibly take off from a carrier
deck.

Certainly, this is what the men in Enterprise's task force thought
when Hornet and her escorts hove into view early April 13. Rumors spread
about the force's mission: some thought the bombers were being delivered to a base in the
Aleutians, while others speculated they were destined for a Russian airfield on the Kamchatka
peninsula. The mystery was solved later in the day, when Vice Admiral William F. Halsey signaled
that Task Force 16 - two carriers, four cruisers and eight destroyers, supported by
two tankers and two submarines - was "bound for Tokyo."

The plan was more daring than most of TF 16's 10,000 men could imagine. After refueling on
April 17, Hornet, Enterprise- the force's
Flagship - and four cruisers would leave the destroyers and tankers behind, to make a
high speed dash west, towards the Japanese home islands. The next afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel
James "Jimmy" Doolittle and his crew would take off alone, arrive over Tokyo at dusk,
and drop incendiary bombs, setting fires to guide the remaining bombers to their targets. Three
hours behind Doolittle, the remaining fifteen B-25s would be launched, just 500 miles from Tokyo.
Navigating in darkness over open ocean, they'd be guided in by Doolittle's blazing incendiaries,
and bomb selected military and industrial targets in Tokyo, as well as Osaka, Nagoya and Kobe.

Though the bombers could take off from a carrier deck, they couldn't land on a carrier.
Instead of returning to Hornet, they'd escape to the southwest, flying
over the Yellow Sea, then some 600 miles into China, to land at the friendly airfield at
Chuchow (Zhuzhou). If all went well, the bombers would have a reserve of perhaps 20 minutes
of fuel. Success depended on the carriers being able to approach within 500 miles of Japan
undetected, and survival on the airmens' ability to evade the formidable air defenses
expected near the target areas.

Hornet, the morning the raid was launched: "Some
of the waves were actually breaking over the deck."

Things went according to plan until early April 18. Shortly after 0300,
Enterprise's radar made two surface contacts, just ten miles from the
task force. As the force went to general quarters, Halsey turned his ships north to evade
the contacts, resuming the course west an hour later. Then, a little past 0600, LT Osborne B.
Wiseman of Bombing Six flew low over Enterprise's deck, his radioman
dropping a weighted message: a Japanese picket ship had been spotted 42 miles ahead, and
Wiseman suspected his own plane had been sighted.

Halsey, however, forged ahead, the carriers and cruisers slamming through heavy seas at
23 knots. Still nearly two hundred miles short of the planned launching point, Halsey strove
to give the Army pilots every possible advantage by carrying them as close to Tokyo as he
dared.

Ninety minutes later, however, the gig was up. At 0738, Hornet
lookouts spotted the masts of another Japanese picket. At the same time, radio operators
intercepted broadcasts from the picket reporting the task force's presence. Halsey ordered
the cruiser Nashville to dispose of the picket, and launched Doolittle's
bombers into the air:

TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND HIS GALLANT COMMANDGOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU - HALSEY